The verdict so far

He plays the role of vague, bumbling fool brilliantly, but what about the role of politician? So far he has produced a flurry of initiatives, some surprising, some not. How good a mayor of London is Boris Johnson turning out to be? Andy Beckett investigates

The verdict so far

He plays the role of vague, bumbling fool brilliantly, but what about the role of politician? So far he has produced a flurry of initiatives, some surprising, some not. How good a mayor of London is Boris Johnson turning out to be? Andy Beckett investigates

It is a dim afternoon in late November. In a windowless exhibition hall in one of the empty corners of east London, "the UK's biggest careers event" for school leavers has been running for five hours. Clots of teenagers wander the corridors, school ties askew. Discarded leaflets litter the floor. People sit slumped against the walls.

For a moment after the new mayor of London appears on the crowded main concourse, no one stirs. Boris Johnson - famous blond mop, creased suit, slight stoop - walks briskly with his smooth young Tory minders towards the exhibitors' stalls, seemingly undeterred. Then eyes began to fall on him. People nudge each other, point him out. There are isolated shouts: "Boris!" Two gangly boys approach him, and his minders let them come right up. "Boris," says one of the boys, giggling. "You all right?" The other boy says: "What about the congestion charge?"

Johnson smiles and keeps walking. Pressing in behind him, all of a sudden, there are scores of teenagers: grinning, shouting greetings, getting their camera phones out, running and pushing to keep up. As soon as Johnson stops at the first stall they surround him. Someone slaps the new mayor of London on the shoulder. Someone wants to shake his hand. Someone bellows: "I love you Boris!" In rapid succession Johnson's open but knowing face registers apprehension, bewilderment, faint panic and then satisfaction and delight. "Hello," he starts saying to people at random. "How are you doing?" If he has anything else to say - about the careers fair, about job prospects for young Londoners in the downturn - it is lost in the noise of the crowd. Yet amid all the smiles and the cameras this does not seem to matter. Johnson looks like a successful mayor.

But is he really? Since May, when he defeated Ken Livingstone, winning comfortably the biggest vote ever secured by a British mayor, and becoming in the process probably the most popular Conservative politician in the country, Johnson has been almost constantly in the news. He has banned the consumption of alcohol on public transport. He has called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. He has forced the resignation of Britain's most senior police officer, the head of the Metropolitan police Ian Blair - on the grounds that he was too controversial, too unaccountable and too close to Labour.

He has also begun to get rid of London's infamous bendy buses, and has launched a competition to design a new version of the iconic Routemaster. He has called for a huge airport to be built on an artificial island in the Thames estuary, to the barely disguised horror of his national party. He has announced a plan for 2,012 new green spaces for growing food in the capital in time for the Olympics. He has drastically reduced the area of London covered by the congestion charge.

This hectic, politically ambiguous series of initiatives, by turns authoritarian, liberal, green and pro-motorist, has been promoted by Johnson in the style familiar from his countless television appearances, books and newspaper columns. "Boris", as even Livingstone calls him, is an unusual modern politician: funny, tactless, ironic, unashamedly posh and expensively educated, compulsively digressive, often alarmingly vague, often disarmingly warm. Being mayor of London, he told the Observer in October, "is just brilliant fun".

Yet having fun has not always looked like the best way to run Europe's largest and possibly least manageable city, and in the process act as an advertisement for the next Conservative government. In the seven months since Johnson was elected, four of his key staff have resigned: Tim Parker, one of his deputy mayors, after a turf war with some of Johnson's other lieutenants; Ray Lewis, another deputy mayor, after allegations were made against him of inappropriate conduct and financial irregularities before his appointment; James McGrath, Johnson's chief political adviser, after he said that black Londoners who disapproved of the mayor's election could "go if they don't like it here"; and Bob Diamond, an enormously wealthy banker recruited to help run a fund for poor Londoners, who decided only six weeks into the job that he did not have enough time for it in his diary.

Then yesterday David Ross, a businessman personally selected by Johnson to scrutinise the Olympic budget and ensure the games' social legacy, abruptly resigned from Carphone Warehouse, the firm he co-founded, after it emerged that he had broken stock market rules by secretly using his shareholding there to secure personal loans. There were calls for Ross to be sacked as the mayor's Olympic representative.

All this suggests a carelessness about recruiting and regulating the behaviour of senior staff. After Johnson's first 100 days in office, the Times called him the "blond bumbler". Other blunders have followed. In July, Johnson said of a crucial and publicly available official document about the London Olympics, setting out how cost over-runs would be paid for, "I rather doubt that it exists." In August, he was criticised in Britain and abroad for appearing at the otherwise immaculate closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in an unbuttoned suit jacket, with his belly protruding and his hair like a small haystack.

In recent days, despite being chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Johnson has criticised the ongoing Metropolitan police investigation into the receiving of Whitehall leaks by the Conservative shadow immigration minister Damian Green. The leader of the Labour group in the London Assembly, Len Duvall, has made an official complaint about Johnson's behaviour, alleging conflict of interest, inappropriate contact with a police suspect and an inappropriate attempt by the mayor to influence the outcome of a police inquiry. A mayoral spokesman says Johnson "maintains he has not acted improperly at all", but in the next four weeks the complaint may be referred to the Standards Board for England, the local government ethics watchdog. Johnson could ultimately be suspended or even removed as mayor.

Those remain relatively remote possibilities. But Johnson's air of clumsiness lingers. When he was running for mayor, one of the main arguments made against him was that he was too insensitive and disorganised, and too over-committed, to hold the position. Since becoming mayor, he has made extracurricular television appearances on Top Gear and Who Do You Think You Are? and, recently, as the presenter for an ambitious series about the Mediterranean region after the Roman empire. He has also continued to write a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph, for which he is paid £250,000 a year, a fifth of which he gives to charity. His mayoral salary is £138,000.

Some of his opponents feel increasingly vindicated by his actions as mayor. "Boris has a feeling that there should be one set of rules for politicians and celebrities, and another for everyone else," says Duvall. Livingstone, who is hoping to recapture the mayoralty in 2012, regards Johnson's errors with satisfaction: "The fiasco with the Olympic memorandum - I enjoyed that one." On the mayor's behaviour in Beijing, he says: "I was in China two weeks ago and people are still appalled. They say, 'This man's a slob.'"

Other, more objective observers of the new mayor and his administration can be almost as scathing. "Boris is very nice, very charming," says someone who worked for and is critical of Livingstone and has been retained by Johnson. "But there's not really anything there. And most of his advisers are hopeless - inexperienced in London government. In City Hall, there's a lack of direction, there's confusion. Strategy documents are produced but things are not followed through. Being mayor is a tough job. As time goes on, it may turn into a complete car crash."

The transport writer Christian Wolmar contrasts Johnson's seemingly haphazard approach - flitting from policies favouring cyclists to policies favouring 4x4s - with the relentless focus of his predecessor as mayor. "With Boris there's no vision. A lot of the things that he's doing are things that Ken was going to do anyway. But beyond that, what's Boris doing about the issue of congestion? What's he saying on the public-private partnership and London Underground?" Despite the constant stream of mayoral announcements, Wolmar detects "a kind of paralysis of ideas".

What is Boris's vision?

But politicians' fortunes do not depend solely on verdicts from experts. There are also public expectations. "The Johnson regime has had the enormous advantage of starting from a low base," says Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, the leading academic authority on the capital. "His opponents painted such a bad picture of him during the election that it doesn't matter, yet, that for the first two or three months he buggered it up, and that we don't have a clear view of what the Boris vision of London is."

Nirmala Rao of the University of London, another writer on London government, agrees: "Boris is something of a leap in the dark for London. But he's not turned out to be as naive as people said. Sacking the head of the Metropolitan police - even Livingstone would not have dared to do that." Eric Pickles, the Conservative shadow secretary of state for local government, says his party is delighted with the performance of its most senior elected representative: "He's managed to catch the public's imagination. He's going to be a mayor we can be proud of." But he offers a more ambiguous assessment of the turbulence that has surrounded Johnson in City Hall: "It could have been a hell of a lot worse."

The behaviour of London's political leaders has long made people inside and outside the city nervous. From the London county council (LCC) of the late 19th century, which some feared could become a rival to the cabinet, to the Greater London Council (GLC) of the 1980s, which pioneered an irreverent new leftwing politics and was abolished by the Conservatives, to the current mayor and the Greater London Authority (GLA), which he heads, the job of running a city of such size and profile has frequently attracted flashy and mercurial politicians. Livingstone is the obvious example. But Tory rulers of the capital have been showmen too: Horace Cutler, the last Conservative to do the job before Johnson, always wore a bow tie, privatised council housing years before Margaret Thatcher, and famously never said no to a camera.

Labour designed the present mayor's position in the 90s so that such mavericks could be kept on a tighter rein by the national government. The mayor and the GLA's powers are much narrower than those of the old GLC or LCC, largely limited to transport, policing and economic development. The GLA's annual budget is relatively small: £11bn, a fraction of what a Whitehall department spends and a quarter of the budget available to the mayor of New York. For all the bold curves of City Hall's steel and glass bubble beside the Thames, inside it is the size of a modest company headquarters.

Yet these limits on the mayor's powers have had the effect of making the mayor's personality all the more important. Incumbents need to charm, build alliances, attract publicity, create an atmosphere; to give the impression of having clout even when they have little or none - in short, they need to be a bit of a chancer. When Johnson announced his candidacy for mayor in 2007, there was a degree of puzzlement: as an MP he had shown little interest in the government of London, his constituency was sedate, semi-rural Henley in Oxfordshire, and his sole management experience was as the rather hands-off editor of the Spectator. But in fact Johnson's ability to bluff and improvise made him a potent candidate.

However, charm and chancing it can only get you so far. When Johnson gave his first speech as mayor at City Hall, and spoke about his actual policies, he lost his fluency, and there was a slightly eerie silence among the journalists, who had not questioned Johnson too closely about his grasp of London issues during the campaign. At one stage, Johnson tried to point towards the Thames, directly behind him through the glass, for rhetorical emphasis. It took him three goes to locate it.

Johnson's response to his new job has been twofold. First, he has brought his quick, inquisitive brain to bear on it. "He has a journalist's knack for instantly synthesising, turning what's going on into a story," says Travers. Even Livingstone concedes Johnson is growing in the job: "We see each other every now and again. Some time round the end of July, I saw that he'd realised, 'Wow, this could be a lot of fun.'"

London, with its spaghetti of public transport systems and intricate social and racial mix, is not the kind of place the Conservatives have much experience of administering in recent decades. As mayor, Johnson has gone about the city with his eyes wide open. Like a lot of modern Tories, he gives the impression of having belatedly realised that poverty and multiculturalism are not just matters for left-of-centre governments. At times he has also surprised critical observers with his command of detail. Launching his housing policy on the Today programme last month, he was so sober and full of statistics and jargon that John Humphrys was reduced to near-silence. People who have worked for Johnson say that he is a fast learner when a subject has his proper attention.

When it does not, he struggles - or he delegates. Unlike Livingstone, whose administration was a machine for disseminating the mayor's wishes, with the identities of his lieutenants usually revealed only in conspiracy-fixated anti-Ken articles in London's Evening Standard, Johnson's senior subordinates have public reputations of their own. Anthony Browne, his policy director, was until the autumn head of the high-profile rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange. Kit Malthouse, Johnson's deputy mayor with responsibility for the Metropolitan police, and a strong influence on Johnson in the removal of Ian Blair, was previously deputy leader of Conservative-controlled Westminster council, where he campaigned against prostitutes' calling cards in phoneboxes. Simon Milton, Johnson's deputy mayor for policy and planning, was leader of the same council, and has been tipped as a future Tory cabinet minister.

To speak to Milton about the Johnson administration's plans for London is a small shock after listening to the mayor's wandering and broad-brush speeches. There are no jokes, no delicious quotes, just the sense of encountering a composed and well-briefed political grown-up. "In the past 10 years London has been very successful economically," Milton begins, "but the ability of people to get around, the liveability of their neighbourhoods, has deteriorated." What can the GLA do about that? "The local authorities are responsible for services. The mayor's office is much more about working through third parties, producing strategies . . . and efficiencies. We've managed to achieve a freeze in the council tax precept [the part of the tax spent by the GLA] . . . There are further efficiencies to be squeezed out."

Milton describes himself as Johnson's "chief of staff". Other people who have worked in Johnson's administration say its internal structure is less clearcut. "There's three or four people who are quite important," says one former adviser, "Anthony Browne, Guto Harri [Johnson's spin doctor], Simon Milton ... Kit Malthouse is very ambitious. They're sort of competing for Boris's attention." Someone who has served both Livingstone and Johnson agrees: "With Ken everyone knew what the hierarchy was. The new administration has appointed lots of smaller politicians, all of whom have their own little visions. There is no strong mayor." The former advisor continues: "Boris is an OK manager, but sometimes he focuses on small things and not on other things. He needs a grumpy chief of staff who knows what his master is thinking. Without one, you will eventually get cliques and low morale at City Hall."

Johnson, his critics say, has a short attention span and a tendency to be overly influenced by whoever has his ear at any one particular moment. Yet the problem with his administration his critics always return to is its absence of a compelling vision. "Ken had a picture of London which everyone understood," says Travers. "It had a green tinge, was mildly anti-car, and favoured an almost Thatcherite economic policy, as long as it left benefits for Ken's leftish causes. People in City Hall now are working for a friendlier regime, but they're still waiting expectantly for a lead from Boris."

Last month, at the careers fair in east London, the crush of teenagers around Johnson was briefly held back by his minders so journalists could ask him questions. I asked him to outline his aims as mayor. Johnson looked slightly blank. Then he said: "My job as mayor is to bring the application of common sense and, you know ... robust, decisive common sense ... to give a lead ..." He muttered something loosely relevant to the careers fair about improving Londoners' workplace skills, and then his answer tailed off, as if he was doing his vague toff act on Have I Got News For You. I asked the question again, phrasing it slightly differently. Johnson looked more engaged: "My job is to make sure that London lengthens its lead as the greatest city in the world." Did he think that eight years (he has said he will serve at most two terms as mayor) would be long enough for such a big task? "We'll give it a good crack."

Playing nice

Some observers suggest that the fresh tone Johnson is bringing to the mayoralty, his cheekiness, his readiness to learn, his sheer likeability, is enough of a new vision for the city. "Boris has a much more open, more cabinet style," says Rao. However charismatic and forceful the mayor is, London is really governed by a crowd of jostling political bodies, from borough councils to the City of London Corporation to the Olympic Delivery Authority, as competitive and labyrinthine as the city itself. One council leader, despite being Labour, feels Johnson is better at these relationships: "I thought Ken was awful. Arrogant, no sense of collaboration. Boris has made the right noises to the boroughs, made a commitment to work more closely with us."

But other observers think Johnson has a tendency to want to be all things to all men. "He doesn't do nasty," says Travers, "which means it's actually quite difficult to face down competing interests." With the capital enduring its first recession for decades, and an increasingly aggressive but cash-strapped Labour government, his administration has not entered office at the easiest of times. Milton predicts some of the coming perils: "It's possible that the grant we receive from central government is going to be negative [shrink]. The timing of the 2012 Olympics is not great for us. Our re-election comes just before, at a stage in the Olympic cycle when [with the inevitable last-minute hitches] you can expect public opinion on the games to go quite negative."

Johnson was elected, in large part, as a feel-good politician: not too serious, light on ideology, ready to lead a city that was still feeling quite rich and confident. That London feels like it is receding fast. Yet, for all the mayor's bonhomie, his administration is making some distinctly ideological decisions. A few have been surprisingly leftish. In July he announced that even the lowest-paid GLA staff would receive a "London living wage" of £7.40 an hour, a third higher than the national minimum wage, a policy supported by trade unions and by Livingstone when he was mayor. Some online Johnson-watchers took to calling him "Red Boris".

Yet most of what he has done has been rightwing when you get down to the detail. Fares on buses, the form of transport most used by poor Londoners, have been raised by more than twice the rate of inflation. The congestion charge for 4x4s and other large cars, the transport most used by rich Londoners, has been cut from £25 to £8. Households earning up to £72,000 a year, almost twice the London average, are to become "eligible for discounted and low-cost homes". As with the Conservatives nationally, these policies have come slyly cloaked in neutral language: Johnson refers to 4x4s as "family vehicles", just as George Osborne presents the right to inherit £1m tax-free merely as a reward for "working hard and saving hard".

Mostly Johnson's administration and the Conservative party are not that close. Campaign operatives brought in by the party rescued his mayoral bid when it was drifting: "Four months before the election Boris hadn't even printed any leaflets!" says one. Yet Johnson ran as a personality first and a Tory second. Nowadays his lieutenants actively discourage the idea that his mayoralty is a model for a David Cameron government. "Ultimately Boris knows he won't get re-elected if he's simply a Conservative stooge," says Milton. London is not typical Tory territory and the professionally restless Johnson may have ambitions beyond it. As mayor, much more than Livingstone, he has been eager to speak up on national issues. He is only two years older than Cameron and will be 51 at most when he leaves City Hall.

For now, "The Conservatives are quite happy he's the mayor," says someone with good contacts in both Central Office and City Hall. "But there's no real connection between Boris and the party, no regular meetings, and that's dangerous. In three and a half years' time he needs the Conservative party to do all the work to get him re-elected."

Johnson may need a lot of help. Even now, his popularity as mayor could be more apparent than real: astonishingly it has yet to be measured in an opinion poll. And Londoners can quickly tire of their leaders. Just off Tottenham Court Road in the centre of the city, there is a faded mural. It is a rather bleak panorama of London life, painted in 1980: traffic, cranes, dark pubs, grey-faced people. High up in the picture, presiding over the near-chaos, is a flamboyant Tory politician who has been viciously caricatured, as a red-eyed, bow-tied vampire. It is Horace Cutler, the Boris Johnson of his day.

Cutler's administration took office in 1977, governed London with flair, and then ran into a recession and a country-wide revolt against the Conservatives. The year after the mural went up, the Cutler regime was voted out. He soon left politics to pursue other interests.

· This article was amended on Thursday December 11 2008. Boris Johnson's director of communications is Guto Harri, not Hari. This has been corrected.

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